Some Kind of Blind
by Threepwillow
Summary: Sirius doesn't understand how James and Peter aren't grasping the deeper meaning of Remus's musical birthday prank, but he's missing a piece of it, too, and it's possibly the most important one. :::RL/SB, pseudo-songfic, written for Remus's birthday!:::


(**AN: **I'm always hesitant to use music too prominently in fic, because I don't want it to be there without serving a purpose, and usually I feel like tossing songs in is just indulging my own personal music taste. That said, I knew the instant I watched _Dames_ and heard the real full lyrics to "I Only Have Eyes For You" that I had to use it with Remus/Sirius in some way, and that I had to do it ASAP. Thus this fic was born. Happy 50th birthday, Remus Lupin.)

-xxx-

**Some Kind of Blind**

"Prongs, there is not a creature alive with bonier elbows than you."

"Tell that to Lily next time she gets me in the ribs, why don't you."

The cloak nearly fell from them, and Sirius grabbed frantically at it with his free hand, tugging it back into place even as he held his wand up to illuminate James's work. James, meanwhile, had the Map in one hand and the visor of a suit of armor in the other, prying it cautiously open to peer inside.

"This should be the last of them, then," he whispered, grinning jauntily.

"Perfect," said Sirius. "Not all of us have your freakish ability to run on two hours of sleep and pumpkin juice fumes."

"And that is why not all of us play Quidditch," James said with a false air of sympathetic bravery. "Please know that I always try to take one for the team."

This time, Sirius elbowed him. "Just do it!" But he was grinning too.

Handing Sirius the map, James delved into his own pockets to retrieve a tiny phial of potion and an even smaller scrap of parchment. Checking around a final time to make sure no one was watching them, James uncorked the phial, stuffed the parchment in, hastily corked it again and then dropped it down into the empty suit of armor. Sirius hissed "_Nox_" and then "_Silencio!_" in rapid succession and just barely managed to mute the crash of the glass breaking on the inside. A smell faintly reminiscent of the earth in Sprout's greenhouses reached their noses a moment later, and they knew the spell was working. Sirius pocketed the Map, adjusted the Invisibility Cloak again, and nudged James in the back, eager to get going.

"I've got to say, Moony's outdone himself with this one," he said.

"Definitely," said James, as they rounded a corner and ducked into a secret passageway behind a tapestry that would lead them back to just outside the base of their house tower. "Never thought I'd see the day when he willingly used his furry little problem as part of a prank."

"This thing is practically flawless. I can't wait to see what they've done to that huge contraption of Moony's! As long as that bit works then there's no way the rest of it can fail."

"Unless McGonagall busts us."

"Prongs, get serious." James grabbed him around the neck. "Har, har. No, but really. It's just after the full moon, _and_ it's nearly Remus's birthday. There's no way she'd nab him for all this."

But, of course, she did.

-xxx-

Somewhere along the line, someone - Sirius was pretty sure it was James - had started the Marauder tradition of pranking on birthdays. Whosever birthday it was got to design the whole thing, and everyone else had to go along with it, no questions asked. Usually this also entailed taking all of the blame for the prank, too, when they were inevitably caught; but Remus, dear kindhearted magnanimous Remus, always seemed to fabricate such elaborate, detail-oriented jobs that none of the four of them could possibly be construed to be the perpetrator, no hard evidence to back up anyone's quite correct hunches that yes, those incorrigible Gryffindor boys were at it again.

Sirius walked down to breakfast on the morning of Wednesday, March the ninth with an extra spring in his step and a broad grin flashed at James and Peter, knowing precisely what lay in store for the day ahead of them:

James and Sirius had been sneaking out of bed for the past three nights, dropping little silver-blue potion bombs on as many suits of armor, statues, non-moving tapestries and even some enchanted doorknockers as they could manage. They'd focused especially on the Ravenclaw corridor and the area surrounding Professor McGonagall's office, though Remus hadn't really specified a place - James had just decided, and rightly so, that these were the people it would probably annoy the most. Meanwhile, Remus and Peter had been using that time to magically link the charmed potion to this great cornucopia-shaped device that Remus had gotten from his Muggle father, a _phonograph_. ("Why this great clunker and not just a regular record player?" "Honestly, Sirius, even you should know that Muggle things don't like to work at Hogwarts. The older the equipment, the more likely I can coax it into functioning in the thick of all this magic." "It's a good thing you're so bloody good at Charms!") As soon as Remus laid a record under the thing's needle, every suit of armor, statue, non-moving tapestry and even enchanted doorknocker would - in theory - suddenly learn how to sing. The songs the four of them had chosen out of Remus's vast stack of records (Sirius swore the only thing he had more of was probably books) would echo through the halls all day, disrupting classes and infuriating the unwise. Since Remus was still lying in bed, pretending to have taken a worse-than-usual beating from the full moon (this was actually quite the opposite of the truth, as it had been the first decently warm night of spring and they'd raced each other from one end of the Forbidden Forest to the other and back), he was free to switch songs in and out all day and monitor the phonograph's functions from the safety of his room. Perfectly reasonable for him to not be in class. And no way anyone could incriminate James, Sirius or Peter, since none of them were anywhere near it.

Brilliant.

"_Brilliant_," Sirius mumbled into his breakfast tea, trying to be inconspicuous about things. Peter nodded, too exuberantly, and James kicked him under the table.

"What songs did you two go for out of all that stuff he has?" he asked covertly. "I just grabbed the most girly, simpering, _awful_ witch music I could spot in there. He had at least two Celestina Warbecks. Eurgh."

"Nah, I wanted Muggle music," said Sirius, grinning devilishly. "Andromeda's husband turned me onto this loud, angry stuff over winter holidays. It's perfect, the daft hoity-toity purebloods won't know what to make of it."

"Kids' stuff," said Peter. "I had one and he had one, those dumb little things they try to teach you at, you know, Snidget Camp or something - "

"Your folks sent you to _Snidget Camp_?" said James, nearly dropping his toast in amused horror.

"Just the one summer!" Peter whined. "It was absolutely miserable there and I made them promise to never send me back."

"Probably wet the bed," said Sirius in a stage whisper. Peter kicked him under the table.

"Did Moony tell you what he'd picked out?"

"No, he didn't, come to think of it," said Sirius. "Don't you know? You two were up there working on that thing for ages."

"He didn't say," said Peter. "Funny, I figured he'd at least tell you."

"What?" said Sirius, not sure what Peter was getting at. "How come?"

"Oh - well - you know, you two being more - interested in music and all that. Sort of thing. Records." He nibbled on a muffin, rodent-like. "He just said something about picking out songs special for each of us. Said we'd know when we heard them."

"Well, let's just hope no one _else_ knows when _they_ hear it," said James. "The ninth is a rotten time to get detention for the rest of the month. That's a lot of month. And part of it is _my_ birthday, which is clearly the most important one."

"Have you even got anything in mind for that yet?" said Sirius.

"Nope. I am confident that the perfect scheme will fall into place."

Sirius kicked him under the table.

They stopped talking about it then, not wanting to push things. Sirius finished up his tea and eggs in restless silence, a still greater wave of excitement rolling up within him. While James and Peter may have made their record choices solely based on the abrasive nature of Remus's prank, he knew that he himself was also trying to send a bit of a message: a big "fuck you" to the pureblood Slytherins, and the world he had left behind for good this past summer. Knowing that Remus was also aiming for more than a laugh and a huge inconvenience excited him even further. What did their darling Moony have to say to Peter? To James?

To Sirius?

His breakfast-filled stomach was still flip-flopping eagerly when the nine o'clock class bell rang as the three up-and-about _incorrigible Gryffindor boys_ sank into their seats in Flitwick's N.E.W.T.-level class - and, right on cue, the suit of armor just outside his door started belting Pinball Wizard, even as he and Peter explained away to the Charms professor that Remus was feeling quite ill and wouldn't be joining them today.

-xxx-

Sirius's mind was far from his lessons that day. He'd meant to do his best, play up almost a parody of studious ignorance in his refusal to acknowledge his participation in the prank, but the singing statues were really just too much of a distraction. True, they were distracting everyone, but they were distracting most people because of their unexpected presence and, as it was soon discovered, the near impossibility of finding ways to make them stop (Flitwick's arsenal of charms hadn't done anything, though Sirius suspected he hadn't been trying quite as hard as he could have; he'd glimpsed the Headmaster himself walking down the hallway merely sporting a pair of fluffy purple earmuffs). No, Sirius knew all about the music - well, but not _all_ about the music. _That_ was the part that was distracting him.

At least two of the songs Remus had chosen had played by the time Sirius got out of Ancient Runes (the music was particularly loud and echoing in Babbling's cavernous classroom) - they weren't wizarding music of any kind that he recognized, but they definitely weren't anything he'd picked out. So far, though, neither of them had particularly spoken to Sirius. If Remus had intended for them to have a message, it was one that Sirius had missed. He found himself listening with almost frightening intensity, desperate to figure things out.

Sitting in the library with James on their free period while Peter (and usually Remus) had Muggle Studies (they'd all thought it best not to return to the Gryffindor common room on breaks so as to keep up the illusion), the first one hit Sirius like a niffler running full tilt.

There were three scholarly-looking busts in the Hogwarts library that had been victims to the music spell, two wizards and a witch. The singing was quieter here - Madam Pince, desperate for silence in her domain, must have at least figured out how to tone the volume down - but Sirius, nearly twitching with his need to decipher Remus's musical code, was sitting all but on top of one of them, ear cocked toward it and hand out to shush James.

"You're getting awfully worked up about this," said James, raising one eyebrow at Sirius out from behind the rim of his glasses.

Sirius didn't answer. The words of the song were sucking him in. It was a man's soft voice, not one he recognized at all, and he'd begun to figure it out by the second sort of verse.

_Are there lilac trees  
In the heart of town?  
Can you hear a lark  
In any other part of town?  
Does enchantment pour  
Out of every door?  
No, it's just on the street where you live_

"Listen in, James," Sirius suddenly realized. "I think this is the one for you."

"Really?" said James, finally getting up from his chair and leaning toward the bust as well. "What makes you say that?"

"Can't you tell?"

James frowned. "It just sounds like a weird Muggle love-song, mate, where they talk about magic even though they don't know anything about it, you know - "

"But it's - " Sirius couldn't describe it. How were the words _People stop and stare, they don't bother me, for there's nowhere else on Earth that I would rather be_ not calling to James's mind the exact same moment in time that they brought to his own?

-xxx-

Remus came to visit, two or three weeks after Sirius moved into James's place for good. It was early July, the weather beginning to edge into the kind of heat that made Sirius uncomfortable. He only stayed for a couple of days (he had to spend the summertime full moons at his own home as part of his enrollment agreement with Dumbledore, and anyway James didn't really have a guest room any more) but they were a couple of sweet, glorious days, fully relishing in the summer while at the same time doing everything they possibly could to ignore it, and how hot it was and how fast it seemed to be going by. Sirius, for one, was in a near-perpetual good mood once he'd gotten out of his parents' house, and didn't particularly want to think about anything.

There was one night when, the moon slipping slowly toward fullness, Remus had become especially philosophical, rolling around inside his own head. The three of them were sprawled on the roof of James's house, staring up into the sky, the cloying smell of honeysuckle from the Potter's mess of a back garden wafting up over them in the heat. The night was very clear and the stars were intensely bright. Everything hung thick in the air, including Remus's voice.

"Awfully good of you to just take Padfoot in like this," he said out of nowhere.

"Of course I couldn't turn him away," said James. "It's about time Sirius got out of that filthy place and into where his family really is. We're bloody _brothers_."

"Absolutely," said Sirius, whose face still stretched into a grin just thinking about it.

"I wish I thought there was anyone who'd do that kind of thing for me."

Sirius sat bolt upright, staring at Remus and trying to figure out at what point he'd gone from being the freakishly-smart near-Ravenclaw (oh, if only it weren't for Potions) that he'd known for five years to the kind of idiot who would say something like that. "Moony, what are you - but you're _Moony_!"

"Exactly," he said. Remus rolled over onto his stomach against the roof, pointedly averting his gaze from the ripe summer moon.

"Absolutely _none of that_," James insisted at once. "Remus, it could have been any of you who turned up on my doorstep last month."

"Don't just say that, you know it's not - "

"Remus fucking Lupin, you could have been walking on all fours and looking like you'd been hit with Wormtail's beard-growing charm gone wrong and I still would have let you into my house, even if it was just to shut you in the cellar for a few hours, _is that bloody clear_?" James hadn't just sat up, he was standing, unruly hair silhouetted against the glow that Remus was so upset about to the point that he almost looked like he was shining from within. "Surely you have to know that," he added, a bit like a deflating balloon. "You're my brother too."

"But you can't mean that," said Remus, weakly, talking into the crook of his elbow.

"He _does_ mean that, Moony," Sirius insisted. "And even if he'd have turned you away, if I were living here with him, I'd have found a way to sneak you in." He forced out a chuckle, and Remus did too in response.

"Know this now, Moony, that if a Marauder should ever turn up on any street where I live, scratching at my door for entrance - bit like a lost puppy, this one, honestly - that I would die before I sent him packing."

Remus rolled back over a bit, and looked up, though if at the moon or at James standing in front of it Sirius couldn't tell. Sirius did his best to sit up straight by James's side and enforce the opinion.

"I know it," said Remus, wet eyes sparkling with the orange starlight. "I know it, now."

-xxx-

James's inability to comprehend the song was practically painful, second only to the pain of how much Sirius _did_ comprehend it. Even Peter noticed his unusual silence at lunch ("Are you feeling all right?" "Oi, Padfoot!" "Maybe we should have left you in the tower instead."), though he did sing along a little bit when Remus played another song from Tommy. He just couldn't stop thinking about everything inside those words.

Those words were Remus trusting James with his whole self. Those words were Remus letting go of his usual lycanthropic insecurities completely, relinquishing himself to the fact that he _did_ have friends after all, friends who could make him forget (for the most part anyway) how horrible his life often became. _People stop and stare, they don't bother me._ Maybe it had originally been an ignorant Muggle love song, like James had said, but if Remus could manage to say something like that, he must have been feeling something pretty intense. The friendship loaded into it was so heavy that Sirius only snapped somewhat out of it when they arrived in double Transfiguration.

There hadn't been a haze invented yet that Professor Minerva McGonagall couldn't pierce through.

"As you all may have noticed," she announced, "our Wednesday has been provided with a soundtrack. I wonder if anyone can tell me how they think we should deal with this...inconvenience. _Mister Potter_?"

James jumped to attention (he'd been staring quite thoroughly at the back of Lily Evans's head - Sirius had a sneaking suspicion that he enjoyed the Warbeck record more than he'd let on). "Gee, I - I don't rightly know, Professor," he said brightly. "Doesn't the school armor usually answer to you as Professor of Transfiguration?"

"Usually," she said tersely. "However, it would appear that whoever has orchestrated - " Peter sniggered - "that is to say, _assembled_ this particular nuisance has crafted their spell quite well, and my regular command has gone ignored. Mister Pettigrew, how do _you_ think this was done?"

"Oh, that must be - must be very advanced magic, Professor, I've got no idea." (He hadn't, really. Sirius and Remus had worked that whole bit out - Sirius had gotten rather good at spells which involved pointedly not following orders.)

"No, I don't suppose you do," said McGonagall. "Maybe Mister Black can enlighten us?"

She was hovering next to his desk, almost uncomfortably close, her mouth pressed into a thin line. Sirius looked up at her and stared her straight in the eye, the hurt from earlier still burning inside of him. "Sorry, Professor," he said boldly, "I couldn't tell you."

"Mister Black, where is your dear friend Mister Lupin today?"

"Oh, he told me to tell you, he's feeling quite ill," he said. "He came down with something - it started getting especially bad _Friday night_ - and he's still - recuperating." Sirius dared her to push that topic with eighteen Gryffindor and Slytherin N.E.W.T. students listening.

"_Still_?" she said.

"Yes," said Sirius, defiant.

"...Well," she said after a moment. "Tell him I hope he recovers quickly, and that next time I hope he tells me sooner, as I like to be informed when students in my house are faring poorly." She strode away from Sirius, still suspicious, and addressed the whole class. "Today's assignment was going to deal with the sorts of Transfiguration commonly used to disguise one's appearance, but perhaps we will save that for Friday. Instead, I think I'll award extra credit to whichever student can find a way to turn this wretched music off."

The Slytherins immediately darted for their notes, desperately sick of listening to the tapestry across the hall (the record had been switched over to one of Peter's picks, the excruciatingly alliterative "Ned Next Door Has a Niffler," while McGonagall had been talking), and Sirius exchanged a sly look with his fellow conspirators. As much as Peter especially could have used the extra credit marks, there was no way they'd do anything to turn the blame on Remus. It was part of the rules of the birthday pranks. Had he been in a more chipper mood, Sirius might even have raised his hand and asked for the real assignment to do, because he actually quite liked the music, and found that it helped his academic performance extraordinarily. But it was then, in the middle of Transfiguration, that the second of Remus's specially selected songs began to play.

Sirius's hands clenched hard onto the edge of the desktop in front of him. Vaguely, he was aware that his Head of House had affixed him with an awfully suspicious glare, but it was pushed to the back of his mind as he found himself staring across to the desk where the other two Marauders sat, and staring past James to Peter, as the tapestry sang the words _And though we haven't got a lot, we could be sharing all we've got, together._

-xxx-

Maybe it was because Sirius had Remus's birthday on the brain (what with it being tomorrow and all that - they'd done the prank a day early rather than push the limits of Moony's "illness"), but when the fun young woman's voice started singing out a message to Peter, the moment it called to Sirius's mind was one from Remus's fifteenth birthday - one he somehow didn't think he was meant to have heard. It was early in the morning, a time of day when _regular_ people were never awake - not Frank or Cristoph across the room, and certainly not James. No, only Remus and Peter awoke naturally at that ungodly hour. And Sirius, much to his own dismay, sometimes awoke at that hour unnaturally (or rather, all too naturally, it being nature that sent a beam of piercing sunlight straight through the window by his bed, though perhaps not nature that had burnt the two-inch hole through his crimson bedcurtains that let the sunlight in to strike him across the face).

"Happy birthday, Moony!" hissed Peter in a not-quite-quiet-enough whisper, and Sirius could hear Remus chuckling softly and the springs of his bed creaking. Sirius was a bit jealous that Peter had got to say it first - he'd wanted to be the first to do it, he liked to be the first to do most everything. But he was still half-asleep, only his ears and eyes and nose really functioning yet, and not his mouth or his limbs, so he rolled halfway over and tried not to listen.

But he was far too curious for that.

"Thanks, Pete," said Remus softly, his voice still crackly from sleep. "What'd you get me?"

Sirius's mouth was at least working enough for him to frown at that. Remus was never nearly that eager to receive gifts from himself or James, always insisting that they didn't have to get him anything. (They still did, of course, because he was their best mate and there were always things he needed - they found it much easier to shop around for him than for each other, certainly, because there wasn't nearly as high a chance of him already having what they bought him.) What made Peter different? Why was his generosity so happily received?

"Er, it's not much," said Peter, and there was a small rustling of paper. "Been running a bit low on my allowance lately, and all, so I went down to visit my auntie in Hogsmeade last time we had a weekend, you know, and we made you these."

Remus gave a faint gasp; then there was a crisp _snap_, and when he spoke again it was with his mouth full. "Awh geez, Pe'er, thass incredible. Whoss innit?"

"Raspberries this time. Auntie Perpetua can grow them perfect year-round, she's quite good with Herbology magic and things."

"So good," said Remus, swallowing. "Here, you should have one too. I owe it to you. Besides, good to take one before Padfoot and Prongs find out about them, or there won't be any left."

Sirius frowned harder at this. He actually hated raspberries. Stupid seeds.

"Cheers, mate. I had a bunch of them that day but they're always better the longer they sit." Peter started chewing on one, too, whatever they were. Sirius couldn't hear anything but the sounds of their nibbling for a few moments, but then Remus spoke again.

"I always thought," he said, "that a homemade gift was rather better than anything you could buy in a store. It - it says a bit more, don't you think?"

"Aw, well it's not much, Moony - "

"No, Wormtail, look, it's perfect. It doesn't feel like someone's bloody _charity_, this way."

"I just - I thought since we haven't got a lot, you and me, I'd just do my best to share what I have got, and all."

"Thanks for sharing, mate."

"Cheers," Peter said again.

Sirius frown turned to a downright scowl, and he jammed his pillow over his head, but it didn't block out the stupid sunlight, or the words he had already heard. And he wasn't going back to sleep - not with the crisp, glossy-paged tome of obscure magical plants and animals still sitting under his bed, wrapped in sparkling paper and bearing a tag that read _To Our Most Precious Bookish Moony_. Something he was sure Remus would have loved to have. Something he had bought thinking only of Remus and the things that would make him happy. Something Sirius never in a million years would have thought of as _charity_. But of course that's what it was - or at least how Remus would see it. With all he tried to do to get away from his filthy-rich (or, as Sirius tended to see as more and more these days, just filthy) upper-crust family, how had he missed the sickening way he was still acting like them, just throwing his money around?

He forced his limbs to work, then. He had a lot of ground to make up for if he wanted to have a hand-made gift for Remus by dinner.

-xxx-

"Did you see the _look_ on Snivellus's face?" James crowed as they descended from the castle and down to Care of Magical Creatures.

"I'll bet his mum tried to send him to Snidget Camp too, from the way he flipped at 'Merlin's Got A Spell For All,'" said Peter with a snigger. "Can you picture him there? Little cap and a walking stick and all?"

"With sunblock potion all across his great nose," said James. "Even you couldn't have been that bad!"

"Never!"

"What did you think of that song Remus played for you, Pete?" Sirius asked suddenly, from where he was walking a couple of paces behind.

"Was that what that was?" said Peter. "I mean, I guess it was sort of about best mates, wasn't it? But I thought that could be for any of us, or all three of us. That bit about being a crazy team and making a scene, you know."

"No, no," said Sirius, "because he played James's earlier, and this one was just so - " He bit his lip, and hoisted his schoolbag a little against his shoulder. So raw. So heavy. So _everything_, the essence of the bond between Remus and Peter - formed to counterbalance the bond between James and himself, which was not an easy task - in one concise track. It was all sorts of words that Sirius could understand in his soul but couldn't voice (least of all because he'd have to admit that he'd overheard that whole conversation in fourth year, and that that's why his gifts to Remus the past two birthdays and Christmases had been cooked or whittled or otherwise crafted himself).

"So what, Padfoot?" said James.

"It's hard to explain," he finished, sort of pathetically.

"You're acting pretty strange about all this, mate."

"Yeah, it's just a prank, Pads," said Peter. "A bloody brilliant one, but still."

Sirius didn't say anything. There were a number of things he wanted to say, but if James and Peter weren't getting it now, he didn't think they ever would.

Care of Magical Creatures was something of a reprieve and a curse all at once. The one area where he and James hadn't managed to plant the singing spell was out on the grounds, as there wasn't really much of anything to plant it _on_ (though Peter had suggested a couple of the flytrap-type flowers in the greenhouses, and James had nearly talked him into tempting to the surface the giant squid in the lake). Getting to go a whole class period soundtrack-free was kind of a relief - as much as Sirius was enjoying the prank as a whole, Peter's music especially was starting to drive even him crazy - but the relative silence seemed to only put him more on edge, instilling in him a constant fear that up in the tower, Remus was playing the song for _him_, and he was missing it.

"You know he's not stupid enough to try to play anything important right now, Padfoot," James said to him in a low voice as they tried to get the Glumbumbles out of the beehive they'd been given (the bees had been mildly Stunned to prevent stinging). "He knows we're down here and that we can't hear the music."

"Right," said Sirius, faking off-handedness.

"I think I'd have to agree with Pete on this one," said James. "You and Moony seem to have this weird musical understanding thing at play here. It's almost like a spell, mate. You're transfixed."

"It's nothing special," Sirius insisted, plucking out another Glumbumble and placing it in the jar to their left. "It's just a bit amazing, him finding such perfect songs for all of this. Like he can take the things he can't find it in himself to say out loud in words and just play them off a record instead."

"Riiiight," said James. "You know, that's something else I'm afraid I'm going to have to start agreeing with Peter about."

"_What_?"

"Oh, nothing, nothing," said James, dropping some purple nettles into the Glumbumbles' jar.

Sirius glanced over at Peter, where today he was partnering with the clumsy Alice Finch (Remus was his usual partner, as he excelled in Care of Magical Creatures where Peter was quite wretched), and then back to James. What did they know that they weren't telling him? How did they have a secret they were keeping so masterfully from him when they couldn't even grasp the meaning behind Remus's song selections? What in Merlin's name was going on?

Potions, Sirius's last class of the day, was much of the same. Slughorn seemed to be in the most reasonable mood of all their professors, possessing a fondness for Celestina Warbeck - something Sirius was certain James had counted on, because the Ravenclaws in their class seemed to twitch with every high piercing note, and any other professor in combination with their blue-and-bronze scholarly ire would have been downright unbearable. Remus, ever-savvy of their goings-on like the genius prank plotter he was deep inside, made sure to play "A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love" right on cue. James started making eyes at Lily. She flashed him a sarcastic, irritated smile, and then dropped a slimy wad of augurey viscera down the back of his robes when she got up to rinse out a couple of phials.

"Romantic," Sirius quipped as James groaned and struggled and tried to shoot a _Scourgify!_ up his own back (succeeding only after about five tries - Sirius gladly would have helped, if only James had bothered to ask him).

"She's coming around," James insisted. "She could have used the thestral dung."

-xxx-

When class was over they rejoined with Peter (he was flushed from racing down the stairs after Divination in time to catch up with them) and headed off to dinner.

"Moony coming down to eat with us?" he panted.

"Nah, 's supposed to be done at half-seven when dinner finishes. He's got a ways to go yet," said Sirius. Still a couple of hours left for Remus to play _his_ song.

Though James's humiliation and his favorite track off his new Clash album had put Sirius in better spirits for the rest of Potions, the bell announcing the end of class had shocked him back into his musical frustration. The day was almost over, and Sirius was certain of it: Remus still hadn't played the song meant for him. The wait must have been intentional, he figured, building up Sirius's suspense. Especially after broadcasting such powerful messages to James and Peter - what was the record Remus had chosen for _him_ going to be like?

Sirius tried to imagine it, a profound moment between the two of them, but his memory only called up little, benign things - a look of sheer camaraderie across a prank-befuddled common room, a heartfelt conversation meant to distract from the impending full moon down at the Shrieking Shack, a whirlwind Hogsmeade trip spent flinging snowballs at the backs of one another's heads. Sirius wasn't profound. Sirius, the more he thought about it, was actually a bit of a tosser. He couldn't give Remus a place to stay, like James would have done. He was rubbish at hand-made gifts and had spent years treating Remus to his _charity_, in ways that Peter never had done. That was probably going to be the sentiment behind Remus's final pick. _You're a great mate, but in reality you're actually a bit of a tosser._

"Great," he muttered. Beside him, James and Peter rolled their eyes, no longer even trying to understand.

They entered the Great Hall and broke out into grins. Hanging above the four long house tables, the lion, snake, badger and eagle tapestries were all singing about Billy's New Broomstick. It had been Sirius and James's greatest accomplishment in their nights of sneaking around, to smash the potion up onto the banners, and it was hard to remain glum in the presence of their four-part harmony voices.

"This one of you lot's?" asked Christoph Boggins, leaning in to grin at them as he helped himself to more potatoes.

"Who else would it be?" said James, smirking back.

"Brilliant, lads," Christoph said. "Good eye givin' the Slytherins the soprano part. They're lovin' it."

"It was all Lupin's idea," said Sirius, "you'll have to congratulate him later." His voice wavered on Remus's name and James shot him a look.

"What?" Sirius grumbled, after Christoph had turned back to his girlfriend, the other Gryffindor house Beater. (He was actually really hoping James would give him an answer to this question, since he didn't really know what it was all about himself.)

"You're just like a bloody girl, with all of this," he said, smirking into his own potatoes.

"What are you on about?"

"You've just been - been thinking awfully hard on this song stuff," Peter said, a little too quickly.

"It's _about_ thinking on this song stuff, though!" said Sirius.

"No," said James, "it's _about_ Moony playing a brilliant prank for his birthday. You are supposed to be laughing. You are supposed to be making fun of Ravenclaws who can't conjure earplugs powerful enough to block out our awesome skills. You are not supposed to be whinging about like you're on the rag."

"_You_, Mister Prongs, are just jealous of my ability to comprehend the finer things in life," said Sirius, posturing ridiculously while at the same time trying to figure out the sneakiest way to fling potatoes at Lily Evans and make her think it was James.

"And _I_ still say, Mister Padfoot, that you're missing the biggest point altogether," Peter mumbled into his pumpkin juice.

"And what exactly is that?" Sirius demanded.

"Oh, no, don't mind me," said Peter. "Enjoy your _finer things_. Work this one out on your own."

They spent the rest of dinner not really talking to each other, just listening to the music (and the even sweeter sounds of Filch, the Slytherins and at least half the Ravenclaws raging over their stew) and engaging in a sort of silent conversation that consisted mostly of food stealing, under-the-table shin kicking, and two of them glancing meaningfully at each other behind the other one's back in all possible combinations. Still Remus did not play the song that was meant for Sirius. As he stirred through the remnants of his pie, Sirius realized that it was probably going to be the final song of the day. Remus never did like to do things halfway, and if it was anticipation he was going for, it was anticipation he was going to get.

Well, fine. Even Sirius Black could be patient when he wanted to.

He waited in the Great Hall long after most of the other students had finished eating, sitting at the Gryffindor table directly under the great lion banner, listening intently to more Warbeck and more Who and more Snidget Camp. Eventually, even James and Peter left.

"See you...back in the common room," said James.

"We'll say hullo to Moony for you," Peter added, sounding hopeful.

"Yeah, yeah, sure," said Sirius. "See you."

The doors of the Great Hall were closing behind them (and perhaps hitting Peter on the way out) when the record started.

Only this _wasn't_ a record - there was no way. Sirius recognized this voice, recognized it in a way he'd never have done if it had been any ordinary Muggle artist singing a Muggle song. Recognized it the way he would have anywhere, with its soft throatiness and gentle warm humor - almost as if it were golden, if voices could have colors. It was a voice he'd been listening to for years. He'd just never really heard it singing.

He was alone in the Great Hall, and Remus Lupin was singing to him.

-xxx-

It had been on the train, Sirius realized. They were boarding the Hogwarts Express to return for their fifth year, and James and Peter weren't there yet (the Potters were perpetually running "fashionably" late, and Peter had no doubt forgotten at least four things and had to turn around to retrieve them four separate times). The platform was abuzz with people, and Sirius, for once, was thankful for his mother's constant need to be freakishly punctual, because he'd got a compartment all to himself. Remus had shown up shortly after.

"Padfoot," he breathed, his soft-throaty-gentle-warm-_golden_ voice somehow seeping into his smile. "Gods, it's good to see you."

"Back to school again, Mister Moony," Sirius said with a mock groan, but he was smiling broadly too, overjoyed to see someone who actually loved and cared about him for the first time all summer. He nodded at the seat across from him and Remus took it, slumping heavily. He had a tired look about him, as if he hadn't slept much recently, and it worried Sirius a bit, but not enough to say anything about it. Remus was always ailing from one thing or another, be it the moon or his own internal struggles or even just a common cold. He trusted Remus to take care of himself - he wasn't stupid.

"How was your summer?" Remus said after a moment, raking a hand through his hair.

"Shite, as usual," said Sirius. "Regulus winning Slytherin the Quidditch cup last year and all, they were quite keen to spend most of the summer talking about that, and how I _haven't been made a prefect, even in the vilest of houses_ - "

"Oh, I meant to tell you, I have!" said Remus.

Sirius's eyes went devilish. "Really? _Brilliant._"

"Now, Sirius - "

"Oh, Moony, come now, you're not really going to go all McGonagall on us, are you?" He put a particular canine whine into his voice (he knew he could often win Remus over with this) and pouted melodramatically. "You're a _Marauder_. Blood brothers, bosom friends, musketeers and all that rubbish James went on about that one time, you know - "

"Yes, Sirius, I understand," said Remus, chuckling. "But I am going to have to follow the rules. How much I let you lot bend them is another thing entirely."

"Well that's a start."

They prattled on about their summers a bit more after that (Walburga had threatened no fewer than three times to hex Sirius's name straight off the family tree; Remus had failed yet again to find a decent-paying summer job) until they ran out of decent things to talk about, or decided that the stories they wanted most to tell would be better saved for when all four of them were together, so as to avoid telling them more than once. Sirius, who up until Remus's arrival had been alternatingly scribbling away at the last of his summer homework and staring out the window in search of his fellow fifth-year Gryffindors, fell back into that, and Remus cracked open a large novel across his lap, leaving the compartment relatively silent. Their long teenage-boy legs extended out into the compartment space between the seats, and after one shift Sirius gave their knees sort of touched. Remus was warm through his trousers and it made Sirius smile a little. It was a wonderful thing about Remus, that when you were with him you didn't even have to talk about things to enjoy his company. His silence was just as grand as his words.

Sirius looked up from his parchment to gaze out the window of the train again, and happened to catch Remus's eye as he did so. It startled him a little, because he'd thought Remus was reading, but his eye had definitely not been on the book in front of him.

"Lots of people out there," Sirius mumbled, scanning the crowd for James and Peter.

"Sure there are," said Remus, his eyes still locked onto Sirius.

-xxx-

_Are the stars out tonight?  
I don't know if it's cloudy or bright  
'Cause I only have eyes for you, dear  
The moon may be high  
But I can't see a thing in the sky  
'Cause I only have eyes for you_

I don't know if we're in a garden  
Or on a crowded avenue

You are here, so am I  
Maybe millions of people go by  
But they all disappear from view  
And I only have eyes for you

-xxx-

When Sirius snapped back to himself, it was to find that he was standing on the Gryffindor table, the top of his head just a few feet below the dangling maroon House banner, which had stopped singing with Remus's voice several minutes ago. His heart was pounding crazed inside his chest, and his mouth was dangling a bit open, as he no longer seemed capable of breathing through his nose. His hands hovered awkwardly at his sides as if there were something he meant to do with them. His mind was racing.

This. This was what Remus had been waiting all day to say to him. This was beyond his raw, openhearted trust and connection with James or the unique kindred spirit stretching between him and Peter. This took all of that, the camaraderie and acceptance and unconditional brotherhood and tossed it into a cauldron that was already filled to the brim with something else, causing the whole thing to spill over in a tidal wave across Sirius of a potion he'd been steeped in the whole time without realizing it.

_Love._

As Sirius's feet suddenly flew into motion completely independently from his brain, he felt a new piece fall into place, a new drop splash into his cauldron, with every single footstep. That look Remus had given him that day on the train. Their odd musical connection that the others just weren't comprehending. James and Peter's suspicious suspicions. _They all disappear from view._ The three of them, united in brotherhood (Marauderhood, more like it) as they sprawled across James's roof. The way he'd never said anything about Sirius's stupid _charity_ to his face, even though it had clearly bothered him. _Are the stars out tonight?_ A glance across the common room loaded with that raw, heavy everything. The day Remus had confessed that he was a werewolf, and the two long, grueling years Sirius spent learning how to give into the change, too. Remus's soft, golden voice singing to the entirety of the castle and to no one but Sirius at the same time. _The moon may be high, but I can't see a thing in the sky, 'cause - _

"I only have eyes," Sirius wheezed, leaning heaving against the side of the portrait hole, "for you."

Remus looked up from the phonograph, which he'd been staring at intently, wand pointed at his own throat. James and Peter were sitting by the fireplace, mouths opening and closing in Silenced demands and inquiries, and some other people were strewn around chatting or studying, but when Sirius's eyes locked onto Remus's, brown-grey and glistening with unspilled everything, they disappeared from view, too. Sirius strode clumsily on his exertion-wobbly legs across the plush common room carpet to the sofa where Remus sat and fell onto him, shoving the huge phonograph aside and burying himself in the other boy, hands in his hair or his shirt or his skin, lips on his hair or his skin or his mouth -

"_Sirius_," Remus breathed.

"They didn't get it," he babbled. "They didn't get a single thing that you were trying to say and I gave them so much shit for it, Remus, because I thought I knew, and I did know but I _didn't_ know, how could I have been so - "

"Sirius," said Remus again, "just forget it all, we've got - "

"Have you been in love with me since that moment on the train? That's when it happened for me, I'm sure of it, only I'm actually a bit of a tosser, so I never - "

"Sirius Black, if Mister Lupin is feeling so ill today, I would suggest you give both him and his sizable phonograph a bit more personal space," said Professor McGonagall sharply, from where she stood just inside the portrait hole that he'd left wide open.

Remus's Silencing Charm finally proved too weak to stand up against James and Peter's desperate desire to vocalize, and they burst out laughing.

-xxx-

It was six o'clock in the evening on Remus Lupin's seventeenth birthday, and Sirius Black was in detention.

McGonagall's idea of a fitting punishment had been for Remus and Sirius to personally scrub and polish and otherwise clean every suit of armor, statue, tapestry, and even enchanted doorknocker that had been elected to serenade them all of Wednesday. _With no magic._ Sirius had insisted on taking all of it himself, arguing that Remus shouldn't be made to have detention on his birthday, and that he had actually been behind that part of it anyway, and Remus had just done the phonograph (all of which was absolutely true, anyway, wasn't it?), and she had eventually relented, but given Remus a stern warning and heavily hinted that it meant he was out of the running to become Head Boy next year. Remus had just taken it all in stride, the corners of his mouth twitching in a way Sirius recognized as prevention of a smile in the face of authority, something Remus had never quite mastered as well as he had himself.

Up in the common room, James and Peter were probably getting the newly of-age Remus drunk on the alcohol that Sirius, oldest of all of them, had purchased expressly for that purpose. Down in the east first-floor corridor, Sirius was wiping at a suit of armor that must have been built for someone Hagrid's size until it shone in the torch light.

"Hey," called a golden-soft voice from a little ways behind him.

Sirius's heart leapt, and he threw down the rag he'd been polishing with and whirled around. "Hey yourself, birthday boy," he said. "You know the party's that way?"

"The party is wherever you are," Remus said.

"I _wish_ I was where the party was," Sirius joked, jerking a thumb at the armor beside him. "You go on. You deserve to have fun. It's your birthday, it was your prank, I do the time. That's how it works."

"What if _this_," said Remus, "is my idea of fun?"

He took the few steps it would take him to get to Sirius, and covered his lips with his own.

They'd done a bit of this the night before, of course. Inevitable, really. There had even been a bit this morning, when Sirius dragged himself out of bed at an hour that no human being should be awake, to make sure he was the first one to wish Remus a true happy birthday. But somehow _this_ - the fact that Remus would abandon his loud, raucous, infinitely more interesting Gryffindor House common room birthday festivities to spend time in the gloom with a grimy Sirius Black, the fact that Remus _only had eyes for him_ - made the heat of Remus's mouth, or the soft press of his tongue, the faint but firm grip of his hand around Sirius's wrist, so much more priceless and perfect and _everything_.

"My love must be some kind of blind love..." Sirius murmured, grinning, as Remus pushed him against the stone wall next to the suit of armor, back into a little alcove, down into a secret passageway, his smile pressed into Sirius's neck. "I can't see anyone but you...."

"I surely hope not," Remus mumbled into his mouth.

-xxx-

"See, look, I _told_ you," said Peter, as he and James polished off the firewhiskey on their own.


End file.
